Sunday, January 31, 2016

So what's Chad been up to? Other than being pissed at USBank and Andrea Tantaros

Honestly, not a lot.

I know I haven't posted many of my morning reading reports lately. There is a couple reasons for that:

1) I go throw my feed every morning and it's the same thing over and over. I figure you guys can only take the same article about the same breach at a different company 10 or 15 times before it becomes repetitive.

2) As far as actual news news goes, it's kind of the same thing coupled with the fact that I feel absolutely no passion for any of this years Presidential candidates. Honestly I am hoping for some highly selective meteor strikes so we can just start fresh.

Other than that it is just school (Technical Writing - boring, Power Influence and Leadership - super boring, especially since "zap them with a cattle prod" is not an acceptable answer.), work, and the Friday night GURPS game which keeps me occupied for awhile.

At least until my fellow players decide to do me in, which after Friday's game may be a distinct possibility:

Background - In game terms our team is a special ops team with a cyber / infiltration emphasis (it's a cyberpunk themed game) that a mission go very wrong. We were being held incommunicado in a GITMO analog, but after a disinformation campaign started by the architects of the disaster we have been dumped in Billings, MT which is now the largest city in the Bakken Special Economic Zone with a population of 3.5 to 4 million heavily skewed male. (it's Billings in 2063 and and the Bakken field and Alberta Tar Sands are just about the only viable petroleum sources left).

The first 3 games in the campaign got us established in the city, kind of, and we started making contact with the locals. Because of the information that's been released we are considered kind of a joke, but in spite of that a local crime boss hires us to steal a horse from a biotech lab located out on the Crow Reservation. We accomplished the job but it was bloody and noisy and I may or may not have accidentally triggered an impending Armageddon by allowing an AI to merge with a semi-intelligent computer worm designed to crack firewalls (or ICE in game terms). We'll have to see how that turns out.

This last game we were sitting in Tiny's Tavern East, which is a bit of a dive bar watch a 60 year old stripper shake her cesarean scars and varicose veins and drinking some form of goat water beer (probably Oly). As we are wasting our lives a former Russian intelligence officer comes in and starts flirting with one of the team. She is enjoying it so it goes on for awhile but he finally gets down to business. He wants us to steal some form of petroleum extraction technology from Consolidated Petroleum. The technology is apparently export controlled.

As this is all going on my character is thinking - I should shoot this guy just on general principles. Then as I am just sitting their listening to my extremely poor jukebox selections someone asks the Russian why he is talking about all this in the open with witnesses. I say, "Because they are recording it so that if something goes wrong we take the blame or if we balk they can blackmail us" The Russian replies, "Well of course we are".

The roleplay goes on for another couple minutes with me throwing some way to subtle hints and then I leave back in the booth pick at something on the wall and shoot the Russian from under the table. I though for sure that would be a give away. It was basically pulling a Han Solo. Unfortunately no one else picked up on it.

Gunfight breaks out. Everyone is yelling at me, "WTF? What are you doing? I don't understand what's going on."

Eventually we prevail and clean up the mess. Dress the corpses in the gear we used on the reservation job. Take them and bury them in a shallow grave and then take the Russians credit chip to the casino and leave it on the floor.

To say that my fellow players were a little confused and angry as the game tame to a close might be a bit of an understatement. Lot's of muttering about all the trouble we would be in and the lost wages. Plus the character the Russian was flirting with was pissed at losing a boyfriend. Which is a big deal when you are a 6'4 350 pound former member of the Soviet Female shotput team with enough back hair to weave a Persian rug.

So we will see what happens next week.

(Note: In gaming related matters I am a VERY unreliable narrator. I tell the story in the way I find most amusing, but it usually has some resemblance to what actually happened)

About Me

53 year old white male oozing privilege and advantage, if you find that sort of thing sexy. But, I care about the less fortunate if you don't. Either way I'm an idiot so take it all with a grain of salt.